Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom by Cummings Robert E. & Barton Matt

Author:Cummings, Robert E. & Barton, Matt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press and University of Michigan Library
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Wikipedia and the Exposure of Discursive Spider Holes

Of course, these issues of textual authority and authorial legitimacy in Wikipedia are not only important to my students; they have also preoccupied a significant number of professional scholars. Both Besiki Stvilia et al. and Page 128 → Andrew Lih have separately conducted recent studies of content production in Wikipedia and offered analyses of the relative quality of its articles. While Lih's piece, “Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism,” pays particular attention to the ways in which Wikipedia was affected after specific articles had been cited in the mainstream press,8 Stvilia et al. utilize methods consistent with library and information science. As such, Stvilia et al. include an impressive multidimensional framework with three distinct categories that are intended to gauge the merits of Wikipedia's Information Quality (IQ).9 Methodological intricacies aside, Lih and Stvilia et al. focus on how Wikipedia articles compare with and conform to the standards of print conventions. Quality, of course, is a problematic term that connotes various things, depending upon usage and context; these studies seem to use it as a measure of legitimacy based upon reliability and fidelity to yet another problematic term: truth.

Thus the respective analyses of Wikipedia performed by Lih and Stvilia et al. are both limited by their inattention to the ways that wiki discourse disrupts standardized definitions of quality, truth, and knowledge. Rather than attempt to rehabilitate Wikipedia into the fold of received wisdom regulating textual legitimacy and the authenticity of truth claims, we should explicate the means by which Wikipedia problematizes the conventions of print culture. For example, as many of the other contributors to this collection address (cf. Barton, Lakeman, and Bossewitch et al.), the lack of traditional authority that distinguishes wiki authorship highlights the rhetorical aspects of discourse production by calling on both readers and writers to exercise responsibility for their acceptance of truth claims. While this rhetorical interplay is inherent in print, it is occluded by the artificial separation of textual production and consumption that occurs with print-based texts. In other words, print-based texts attain an illusory durability and authority because readers are unable to alter the text in any meaningful way, irrespective of how they rewrite the text through their own idiosyncratic interpretations.

George P. Landow's pioneering work on hypermedia's effects on composition in Hypertext 2.0 addresses this issue.10 Landow maintains that collaborations between writers/readers and textual producers/textual consumers exist in the medium of print but that ever since Gutenberg the technology of the book “systematically has hindered full recognition of collaborative authorship.”11 Page 129 → In contrast, Wikipedia, and wikis in general, are vital because they reveal formerly hidden aspects of textual production, including the erroneous supposition that legitimate writing is produced in vacuums by solitary experts. What enables wiki software to expose the fallacies of print culture is that each writing product that they represent is highly textured. In the case of Wikipedia there is a clear distinction between the official discourse represented in an “article page” and the unstable discourse that appears in a “talk page” corresponding to articles.

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